Diabetes is a serious, lifelong disease which can cause long-term complications that affect almost every part of the body. This disease often leads to blindness, heart and blood vessel disease, strokes, kidney failure, amputations, and nerve damage. Uncontrolled diabetes can complicate pregnancy, and birth defects are more common in babies born to women with diabetes. Diabetes is widely recognized as one of the leading causes of death and disability in the United States.
It is believed that earlier diagnosis and treatment can prevent or delay the costly and burdensome complications of diabetes. Currently, about 5 to 6 million adults in the United States have diabetes but do not know it. The simpler testing method of measuring fasting glucose should help identify these people so they can benefit from treatment sooner. Traditionally, the criteria for diagnosing diabetes relied heavily on performing an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). In this test, the person must come in fasting, drink a glucose syrup, and have a blood sample taken 2 hours later. This complicated procedure made detection and diagnosis of diabetes a difficult and cumbersome process. Recently, it is recommended that OGTT be eliminated from clinical use and that fasting plasma glucose is used for detection and diagnosis of diabetes. A fasting blood glucose of 126 mg/dL or greater is the value to diagnose diabetes since this value has been found to be associated with an increased risk of diabetes complications affecting the eyes, nerves, and kidneys. For such test, a patient still needs to come in fasting and is forced to draw blood and to endure discomfort associated with needles to obtain blood samples for testing fasting blood glucose level. Blood samples are generally to be sent to a specialized laboratory for testing and it typically take a couple of days to obtain the testing results. If the testing results show a fasting blood glucose of 126 mg/dL or greater, that patient needs to undergo a second test to confirm the diagnosis. Although the fasting value can be easily obtained during routine physician visits, in clinics at the place of employment, and other situations, a fasting test may still be inconvenient, uncomfortable, and cumbersome. Therefore, there is still a need for a diabetes-screening method which is fast and can alleviate the discomfort and inconvenience for patients.